Larger-than-life bugs come to the Virginia Living Museum

The Virginia Living Museum is really gonna BUG you in 2016. Opening Dec. 31 is BIG BUGS. This larger-than-life animatronic exhibit will feature supersized critters: the Madagascan sunset moth, the bombardier beetle, dragonfly, stag beetle, orb-web spider, say’s firefly. The multifaceted exhibit also includes a caterpillar photo-op, a display of live insects, beautiful photographic banners of bugs and other invertebrates and live animal programs, all designed to showcase a bug’s life and why insects are important.

The Virginia Living Museum is really gonna BUG you in 2016. Opening Dec. 31 is BIG BUGS. This larger-than-life animatronic exhibit will feature supersized critters: the Madagascan sunset moth, the bombardier beetle, dragonfly, stag beetle, orb-web spider, say’s firefly. The multifaceted exhibit also includes a caterpillar photo-op, a display of live insects, beautiful photographic banners of bugs and other invertebrates and live animal programs, all designed to showcase a bug’s life and why insects are important.

Ordinarily, many of us may find it easy to pay little heed to the bugs we come across in our daily lives, meeting them with a stomp of the foot or a swat of the hand.

A new exhibit at the Virginia Living Museum aims to get visitors to think of them in a new light.

"Big Bugs," on display through April 17, will feature animatronic robot displays of six creepy, crawly creatures standing between five- and 12-feet tall.

The creator of the bug robots, Billings Productions, also makes the dinosaur robots that will make an appearance at the museum in May after the bugs exhibit is packed up.

"This'll be fun. It'll flip the table," said Fred Farris, deputy director of the Virginia Living Museum. "They'll be giant; we'll be tiny. One reason we don't appreciate insects is because they're so tiny."

The Virginia Living Museum is really gonna BUG you in 2016. Opening Dec. 31 is BIG BUGS. This larger-than-life animatronic exhibit will feature supersized critters: the Madagascan sunset moth, the bombardier beetle, dragonfly, stag beetle, orb-web spider, say’s firefly. The multifaceted exhibit also includes a caterpillar photo-op, a display of live insects, beautiful photographic banners of bugs and other invertebrates and live animal programs, all designed to showcase a bug’s life and why insects are important.

(Joe Fudge)

Visitors will be able to learn more about the bombardier beetle, which shoots a toxic chemical at predators, and how orb-web spiders make their webs.

They'll be able to interact with the displays and learn how stag beetles and dragonflies move.

If that's not enough, the exhibit also will include live displays and bug programs to include creatures such as hissing cockroaches, blue death-feigning beetles and mealworms.

"Bugs have a bad reputation, so we're trying to get people to change their opinion," said Farris.

The animatronic creatures will be shown alongside a collection of colorful photographs of invertebrates — from beetles to spiders to crabs and scorpions — taken by Piotr Naskrecki, a Harvard University entomologist who is a photographer and author.